KVIFF 2021: Award Winners, Highlights, and a Video Diary | Festivals & Awards

I was thinking a lot about “Alyam, alyam” during “Mariner of the Mountains” by Brazilian born Karim Aïnouz. It’s a deeply personal travelogue documenting his first journey to Algeria to see his father’s birthplace. It moves at the speed of thought, with the teeming montage finding an image for every thought and half-sentence that needs elucidation. Stunning work, honest to a fault, and never less than heart-rending. Both it and “Alyam” show people who live tucked away from the wider world. Some want out, some want in, and everyone feels cut off. 

Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s new film “Come Here” is similarly about dislocation, though it takes a more abstract approach. It follows four people on a sort of pilgrimage and then recreates little moments of their journey later in a film studio. That’s a very simple description of a non-linear work of longing and unrest, you should just experience it yourself as soon as possible. Its elegiac and velvety monochrome images haven’t yet left me. 

I watched two films by a couple of old hellraisers in the form of Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta.” One is perhaps the best fiction film of the year. The other is Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex.” “Vortex” is a claustrophobic study of two people dying, and it’s about as exciting as that sounds. Noé has imagined that by draining his usual neon out of the movie, he’ll prove he’s matured. He has not. Dario Argento, one of the great filmmakers, plays one of the leads and unfortunately I was too attached to it to walk out of the movie, so I was bludgeoned by two hours of misanthropy and misery. “Benedetta,” about a cloister suddenly overcome by madness when one of their ranks experiences stigmata, is a netherhair shy of the standard set by Ken Russell’s final word on nunsploitation, “The Devils.” However, not being quite as good as one of the best films of all time isn’t really a criticism. This movie must be seen. It’s absurd and beautiful, a semi-sequel to his 1985 opus “Flesh + Blood” and it’s every bit as bracing, violent, sensuous and depraved.

With a new classic fresh in my system it was time to go home, but I asked the driver to drop me in Prague for a few hours first. I wanted to just walk around and it seemed absurd to have traveled this far and not see some of it for myself. I walked slowly along the gray cobblestones beneath the gray sky and just let the week’s excitement and chaos drift off into the Vltava river. It’s not everyday you get to see these things, hear these sounds, meet and reconnect with people who love art the way you do. I’m happy to be back, but I’ll be disappointed for a while that every morning I wake up and can’t look out my window and see Karlovy Vary.